Home: Europe:
Bretagne
the beginning of all art — / in the deep north / a rice-planting song
Matsuo Basho
September 2009
I woke up with the sound, and for a minute wasn't quite sure where I was, and then it was the high pitch of a scooter over cobblestones echoing off an entire city of stone and dirt and smokers and clichés, and I knew I was in Paris, somewhere beyond Pont Neuf, so ugly compared to the bridges of Isfahan, past Notre Dame, unbearably overloaded with architecture and tourists, where the faithful can buy a fake gold medallion from a vending machine for two Euros and the charitable can look around for the grimy box between the pillars, while the really insistent will crowd around its dry gardens and kiss and take photographs and get out of the bus and blow bubbles and buy crêpes full of Nutella.
But I was far away, recovering from a bottle of Camay, and near-molten goat cheese on toast and slivers of duck in honey and prunes on lamb and fish on rice and an island of egg white weighed down with shards of almonds drowning in caramel sauce. And the croissants at Les Deux Magots were unbearably greasy and the chocolate was too sweet but it was brought out on a silver platter by a waiter with a bowtie and the walls were all gold paint and mirrors, and the two Chinese magots — whatever the hell a magot is — stared down at me with as much emotion as a Chinaman, or a Japanese car, and the floors were little square tiles of browns and white with a strip of blue, and the old tables were polished till they shone and then it wasn't so bad.
And in Guingamp (pronounced as in Gaugain but the other way around) I'm eating a plate of sausages with a pitcher of wine and a loaf of bread, and I thought that was the meal until the pork and potatoes and beans arrived, and there were lace curtains and peeling paint, and then tarte Tatin. The waiter said it was a pity, with a slightly theatrical but half-earnest closing of the eyes, that I wouldn't try the cake, and insisted on pouring me a Calvados which, he said with a clench of the fist, was an excellent anti-flu, which made me sip it till I choked.
I choked on the frites and mayo in Amsterdam too, stuffed into a paper cone for the Eurotrash that the city invariably attracts. But that was far away. Instead, I start my four-course meal in the little village tucked under La Manche, starting with the heart of artichoke, picking my way through salmon slapped over coppa and beef mince layered over mashed potato and an entire onion grilled till almost molten, and Swiss cheese called Tête de moine because it came curled like the hair sticking out from under a monk's cap, and little balls of tapioca with strawberries and biscuits and cream. And the Camay is preferred cool with moules, but the moules are dead boring. Not even the frites make it better.
And the sun doesn't come up when it should, so I lie in the château when it is dark, but it is already time for breakfast, for a little pitcher of chocolate while the huge dog waits in the sun outside, slightly wet with due, and walks over and collapses over my feet, and follows me into the forest, over the squishy leaves and through the cobwebs, under chestnuts and laurels and oaks, out into the blazing sunlight and the fields of turnips, with the boat with the white cross resting on the muddy bottom of the creek while the tide recedes a kilometre away. A massive Leonberger is in the fields but he doesn't see us, and the dog thumps downhill to the sea. It could be hot in the sun but the light sparkles and it is cool in the shade of the forest.
And my crêpe crackles in Quimper, and even the school children wish me bon appétit as they pass by and I wash it down with cidre, on the street, outside the shop where I buy the flick knife with the genevièvre handle. The cidre is best in the mornings, but it should have more alcohol in it. The Calvados is better, especially when used to flambé the crêpe.
But it is twilight in le Conquet, and the sea is rushing in so fast it gives you vertigo when you stand in the middle of the bridge with the blue wooden railings. And there are two tides in a day and that's eight meters of rise and fall and double the vertigo, and I crash down on the bed over the whitewashed wooden floorboards, in the room with soft grey wallpaper and pastel purple paint over the accessories, and the wooden bird over the fireplace. Around the corner the old stone houses stand over the creek, looking almost exactly as they have for the past 500 years, the pockmarked stone and flowers on the staircases without railings and the painted wooden window shutters. And le Conquet grew rich with its middlemen sailors ferrying goods between Asia, the Middle East and Africa up to Britain and northwestern Europe. And when they couldn't trade with the British they became pirates and plundered them instead.
But the British are running away from Britain, and you will find Bretagne infested with them, buying and now selling little stone cottages, squeezing into bicycling shorts on the little village roads, cursing the weather, gathering at the French restaurants. Huelgot, a once-charming town on the edge of a forest that supposedly holds King Arthur's cave, is unimaginably attractive to them, so much so that 30 per cent of the population is now from the UK. That means that you have to fight your way through the pile of soggy British underwear at the laverie, stay at Laura's B&B and be served oats for breakfast and even, horror of horrors, eat dinner at a French restaurant that is actually British.
I fled and dreamt I was eating the crabe parmentier at the Hôtel du Port with the bad painting of Marilyn on the wall and the waitress in the lavender top with frilly shoulder straps.
But whatever you do, never order the andouillette, a kind of sausage from hell that should never have been invented, but which the French insidiously insert into the ever-present Carrefour and even the gourmet restaurant in Tréguier. When you have it on your plate it is the smell of death, but worst is if you ever get to the point of cutting it open.